Dime is the premier basketball magazine, covering the NBA, NCAA, High School, Playground and International basketball - as well as sneakers, fashion and music.
Issue link: http://dimemagazine.epubxp.com/i/56522
THE RUNNING MAN DIME πππππππππ πππππππππ TRAINING S INTERVIEW. LUCAS SHAPIRO PORTS AND SCIENCE are usually two subjects that do not intertwine in the class- room. John Brenkus, however, found a way to combine his two favorite subjects from school as the co-creator, co- executive producer and host of ESPN Sport Science. After featuring Brenkus in Dime #58, we sat down with him again to discuss how he got into the game, NBA rookies and the future of sports. Geographic. That became one of their top- rated shows of all time. Fox owned National Geographic, so they also aired Fight Science on Fox Sports. It rated through the roof for them. They asked us what other things we were working on and we told them that we were looking into the science of other sports. That ended up going on Fox for two seasons, and then ESPN came along and signed us. Dime: Were you a sports fanatic before you became a scientist, or a scientist before you Dime: How did you get started with all this? John Brenkus: My partner Mickey Stern and I had owned a video production com- pany called BASE Productions. We made several shows about human biomechan- ics. We made one show in particular called Fight Science, which was on National began studying sports? JB: My major in college was Rhetoric & Communication Studies, which is the theory of the argument. I've always been strong at creating compelling arguments. In Sport Science, my role as host came when we were on Fox Sports and our manager told me that I was great at articulating points along with the science portion of the stud- ies. Now I am the voice, face and creator of Sport Science, which has been taken to another level since we joined ESPN. 36 Dime: Have you come across any outliers in your studying of athletes? Were there any ath- letes with one attribute so extreme that you could not even believe they were human? JB: The question that we get a lot is "Who is the best athlete?" or "Who has impressed you the most?" My answer is not a cop out answer at all, but in order to get into the Sport Science lab, you have to be in the one- millionth percentile of human beings on the planet. Every athlete that comes into our lab truly blows us away. We aren't just taking the average player. We are taking ex- ceptional players. There isn't one guy that is head and shoulders above everyone else because everybody blows me away. Dime: I noticed that some of your segments are done in the lab and some are done using film. Are you able to analyze athletes just using their game film? JB: We have a very unique data set of dif- ferent tests that we've done. We are going into our fifth year now, and we've had hun- dreds and hundreds of the world's greatest PHOTOS. BASE PRODUCTIONS